Over the past few years, there have been persistent rumours that NVIDIA, the graphics chip maker, was working on an x86 chip to compete with Intel and AMD. Recently, these rumours gained some traction, but NVIDIA's CEO just shot them down, and denied the company will enter the x86 processor market.

"GPU are not so interesting in computing, only on very specific tasks, and even there nothing so great that would give it a solid advantage."

Maybe on Windows PCs.

For OS X and some instances of Linux, the OS takes full advantage of the GPU leaving the processor to be dedicated to do more demanding tasks. in the end, it can and DOES make a system faster when properly integrated into the OS.

Windows has damn good GUI acceleration. Desktop Windows Manager which is responsible for accelerating the Windows 7 GUI is taking up 26Meg of ram according to task manager, Skype is using 28Meg.

Windows 7 has pretty good GUI acceleration which doesn't eat up my memory and is damn responsive on this Integrated graphics card.

Anyhow where does this myth come from that you need a graphics card accelerating the GUI otherwise it degrades performance horribly? ... unless your app is using software 3d acceleration or heavily relying on the graphics card to help it with additional processing (Adobe CS4) any CPU in the last 6 years can do at least 1280x1024 any application degradation that you are likely to notice.

Windows has damn good GUI acceleration. Desktop Windows Manager which is responsible for accelerating the Windows 7 GUI is taking up 26Meg of ram according to task manager, Skype is using 28Meg. Windows 7 has pretty good GUI acceleration which doesn't eat up my memory and is damn responsive on this Integrated graphics card. Anyhow where does this myth come from that you need a graphics card accelerating the GUI otherwise it degrades performance horribly? ... unless your app is using software 3d acceleration or heavily relying on the graphics card to help it with additional processing (Adobe CS4) any CPU in the last 6 years can do at least 1280x1024 any application degradation that you are likely to notice.

Windows, OSX, KDE4 and recently I believe also GNOME desktops use 2d graphics acceleration using a GPU.

I have an ATI HD2400 graphics card (a very low end card), but even this very modest and inexpensive graphics card speeds up the KDE4 desktop quite a bit through 2D acceleration. I am using the radeon open source graphics driver, which doesn't have 3D functionality as yet, and it won't have until Linux kernel 2.6.32 comes out.

PS: When kernel 2.6.32 comes out, since ATI GPUs are far faster than Intel GPUs, after a little while ATI GPUs will become the best option for Linux. They will have open source drivers integrated with the kernel, like Intel GPUs, but unlike Intel they will also have performance on par with nVidia GPUs.

Anyway ... the speed of desktop graphics are nicely enhanced by 2D hardware GPU acceleration when it comes to operations such as scrolling or resizing/moving windows, and also for "bling" enhancements like pop-up notifications, hihglights, widget animations, transparency, fade-ins and fade-outs and shadows.

Anyhow where does this myth come from that you need a graphics card accelerating the GUI otherwise it degrades performance horribly? ... unless your app is using software 3d acceleration or heavily relying on the graphics card to help it with additional processing (Adobe CS4) any CPU in the last 6 years can do at least 1280x1024 any application degradation that you are likely to notice.

Don't think GUI acceleration, think OpenCL and parallel processing. A bad ass video card coupled with a nice quad-core CPU is like having a Cray on your desk.